THE AFTERMATH: Staff accounts of the tornado

Wednesday

Apr 27, 2011 at 10:17 PM

Muffled screams could be heard from a pile of debris that used to be an apartment complex at Arlington Square in Alberta on Wednesday. In the wake of a violent tornado that devastated Tuscaloosa, it was a similar scene along the path of one of the fiercest storms to ever hit the city.

Staff Report

Muffled screams could be heard from a pile of debris that used to be an apartment complex at Arlington Square in Alberta on Wednesday.Firefighters, police officers and Alberta residents stood atop the pile, digging with their hands, using chain saws to cut through planks and using floor jacks to lift the walls that had fallen on top of a University of Alabama student who was trapped several feet under the debris.

The woman yelled that she couldn't feel her legs.

They kept digging, but as night fell, her rescuers still had not been able to free her from the rubble. The tornado that hit Tuscaloosa Wednesday devastated the Alberta community. Few, if any, houses and buildings remained standing. Trees and power lines were strewn everywhere.

Cars were flipped over, stairwells were twisted and people were trapped in their homes, calling to first responders for help. People sifted through the remains of their homes looking for anything they could salvage.

The air was filled with the sounds of sirens, and people sobbing and yelling in search of family members. People laid blankets over the bodies of neighbors lying in the ruins of the destroyed homes.

First responders didn't attend to the dead. They were busy attending to the many injured and trying to rescue those who were still trapped.Scores of people, many bleeding, limping and others being carried, fled Alberta for DCH Regional Medical Center.

“I was in the bathroom in my house at 915 Alberta Drive when the tornado hit,” said Fred Jackson, 48, as he walked from Alberta towardDCH carrying the few possessions he had left.

“The earth went to moving,” he said. “Roots were pulling up. Everything was moving. The house is destroyed. We had to get outthrough a window. We're just trying to find cover before the next one hits.”

As people walked the streets, talking to people over cellphones, many kept repeating the same line: “Alberta is gone. I've lost everything.”

Businesses at the corner of McFarland Boulevard and 13th Street near DCH were destroyed by the tornado. Steak-Out, Big Lots, Full Moon Barbecue, Krispy Kreme and surrounding businesses were reduced to piles of rubble.

Emergency workers sifted through debris and called out to anyone who might be trapped.

Steak-Out manager Ellis Ball said that he and two other employees took shelter in the restaurant's cooler.

“We saw it spinning across the street. The next thing you know the building was crumbling down all around us. Then we just climbed out of the rubble,” he said.

“It happened too fast to be scared,” said Steak-Out driver Henry Nixon, who moved to Tuscaloosa after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. “This is exactly what New Orleans looked like, but on a smaller scale,” he said.

Sharon and Bruce Howard were eating at Full Moon with their children Rebecca, 11, and Tracy, 10, when the tornado hit. They were huddled in the restaurant's cooler with about a dozen employees when the building started shaking.

“I grabbed them and held them to me, then the cooler collapsed on us,” she said. “It was such a relief when we saw people trying to get us out.”

Full Moon employees Carolyn Forkner and Sara Lynch were searching through Forkners destroyed car to find shoes for the Howards.

“This is like a nightmare, I just want to wake up,” said Forkner, who was still wearing a drive-thru headset as she surveyed the wreckage.

Emergency vehicles had a difficult time navigating through the hundreds of vehicles travelling west toward the hard-hit area. Most of the passengers took photos and hung out of the vehicle windows to get a look at the devastation. Some people walked through the wreckage, trying to reach people on cell phones, although service was spotty.

Many of them wept, running toward damaged businesses to look for people trapped in the rubble. Crowds lined the railroad bridge and hills near DCH Regional Medical Center to watch the scene, manyof them parking and walking from as far as the hospital.

Lafe Murray was driving to his home off Hargrove Road East around the time the tornado moved through central Tuscaloosa. He saw people stopped at the intersection of Skyland Boulevard East and Hargrove Road East.

“I turned around and saw a dark cloud dipping down and touching the ground. From the sides of it, two other funnels were whipping out at the sides,” he said. “It was terrifying.”

The tornado leveled buildings on 35th Street between Interstate 359 and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard before moving to the heart of the city.

A Tamko Building Products warehouse off 35th Street was blown away and trees that once lined the street were gone. Tall transmission power lines lay across the street. An Alabama Power Co. substation was smashed, a sign that it would be a long time before crews could repair the damage.

About 30 Tamko employees huddled in the basement of the company's main facility as the tornado passed. None were injured, employees said after the storm.

Across the street, ABC Supply Co., which provides roofing supplies, was nearly leveled as steel beams were bent. Ron Fawcett, store manager, sent his employees home about 30 minutes before the tornado, leaving himself shortly after. He returned to the store after the storm, and little was salvageable, he said.

“My trucks are destroyed,” he said. “The whole place is gone.”

Traveling east on 35th Street across Kauloosa Avenue, there was severe damage to the Tuscaloosa Environmental Services and Cintas facilities. A train sat idle as power poles lay across the track.

Just west of the industrial area, where Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard turns into Moody Swamp Road, trees and power poles blocked the road. On Willow Lane, a neighborhood street, a tree fell on a house, but the tornado skipped over the houses as it tore over a creek towards town.

Mary Burl and her adult son watched the storm approach.

“(My son) said there it is, right there,” she said. “We ran inside to the bathroom, and I got in the bathtub.”

Her house and the street were mostly spared.

“It had to jump over us,” she said. “We were blessed.”

For more than 40 years, P&P Produce on Greensboro Avenue has served the residents in the Rosedale community. Wednesday night, melons and vegetables lying in a pile of flattened rubble was all that remained of the landmark neighborhood grocery.

The business had closed because of severe weather early Wednesday afternoon, so no one was inside.

Nearby, homes were missing roofs and walls. Many houses were buried beneath fallen trees. Some trees had sliced through roofs. On blocked streets nearby, the destruction was even worse.

“Rosedale Court is gone. It looks like a war zone,” said George Weatherspoon of the housing project a few blocks to the east. “It looks like three to four units are all that is left standing,” he said as he walked out of the area. “Rosedale Court is just leveled.”

Sirens from ambulances, fire trucks, police cars and rescue vehicles wailed constantly through the area. At least seven seriously injured people were sent to hospitals early in the rescue effort, according to one firefighter. But he said the search for the injured continued.

Meanwhile, rumors about people still missing swirled through the neighborhood.

Katherine Honnicutt, who lives on 26th Street near the heavily damaged Rosedale Baptist Church, said she heard the tornado coming and threw a mattress over her bedridden father, who couldn't be moved from his bed. She said she had enough time to to make sure he had an opening so he could breathe before she and other family members dashed to a closet for shelter.

“I lived here for 32 years, and this is the worst I have ever seen,” she said. “I was standing at the door and saw it coming.”

Honnicutt said the wind roared over her home, “It sounded like a tornado as it was going over.”

A power pole fell across her side yard, but she said she was stunned when her brother called her to the front of the home after the tornado passed.

A silo-like steel cylinder, more than a story high, had been blown from a lot across the road and landed on the hood of her car, which was parked alongside the house. She said the car was not insured.

Meanwhile, the roof of her modest home was partially peeled away. A backyard shed was gone.

Cammile Ison, who lives on the west end of 26th Street, in an area abutting the interstate, said she opened the door to the storm and the wind almost blew the door off.

“I couldn't shut it. Outside, everything was just flying in front of me.”

She said she told her kids to take cover and sought cover herself. She said trees were down in her yard but she said her home did not appear to be damaged.

Up the street, metal roofing dangled from Rosedale Baptist Church and farther south on Greensboro, the Salvation Army building that houses the organization's thrift store looked as though it had been hit by a bomb. Every window was blown out and the roof was damaged.

Throughout the area, cars that had not been crushed by trees had their windows blown out. A few were flipped over.

As dusk arrived, fear of another tornado gripped stunned residents of the neighborhood.

“They say another tornado is heading this way,” Honnicutt said as she hurried to check on her ill father.

A heavy feeling of uncertainty and fear hung in the air, mixed with the smell of natural gas and twisted pine in the neighborhoods south of 15th Street in the immediate wake of Wednesday's tornado.

Other than the faint beep of heavy equipment moving debris from Forest Lake Avenue, the area was silent.

Breaking that silence was 21-year-old Brandon Reid, moving from crushed home to crushed home along the street, calling out for people inside, looking to help anyone he could find.

“I really don't know what I'm doing,” he said, his voice shaking as he moved through the rubble of a fallen home.

“I just know that Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself and I know I would want help if I were trapped inside my house.”

Joseph Grogan and his roommate, Austin Johnson, live in the 1700 block of 4th Avenue. They saw the twister moving from behind their home headed from Hackberry Lane toward Highway 82.

“I saw it coming right for us and it was spitting debris everywhere,” Grogan said. “I could hear stuff hitting all around me outside and I ran inside.”

Grogan and Johnson ran into the bathroom of their small house and ducked into the bathtub.

“It came through and I was in the bathtub and the window shattered next to me and Joseph told me to cover my face,” Johnson said.

After the twister passed over their home, Grogan emerged in time to see the tornado sitting on top of a house across the street.

“I came out on the front porch and saw it spinning right on that house,” Grogan said pointing to a tree that had fallen right through the middle of the home.

“It just sat there too. Like it was chilling. It sat there a long time before it moved out of sight.”

Workers from the Tuscaloosa Department of Transportation began removing trees and debris from the area immediately after the storm left.

Around 8 p.m. Wednesday, one TDOT worker, who asked not to be named, said they had pulled at least three people from homes.

Lora Clark, 73, has lived in her home on Lake Avenue since 1973. She was asleep as the tornado passed over her home and awoke to see a horrific image outside her back door.

Gazing across the small pond at the back of her home, all that could be seen were crumbled houses and trees snapped in half.

Though her home is still standing, much of the roof was ripped off and her car is damaged. Windows at the back of her home were also shattered.

Clark said she is more worried about the neighbors across the pond.

“There's not much I can do about my home,” she said. “I just look over there and feel like what happened to me is not very important.”

Sharon Roberts lives directly across the pond from Clark. The house sustained significant damage, with much of its roof ripped off completely.

Roberts said she saw the storm coming and took cover in her bedroom.

“My brother-in-law called and said it was coming straight at us and I looked out the window and saw it hovering over the lake,” she said.

“It was huge and all you could see was black and it was just spitting trees and things everywhere.”

Around 7:30 p.m., Roberts was still waiting to hear from her daughter who lives in an apartment with her boyfriend on Veterans Memorial Parkway near University Mall, one of the hardest hit areas.